On his blog today, Coyote discusses the absurdity of hitpoints, while yet finding them worthwhile.

Of course, he’s right that the idea of hitpoints as a life indicator is silly. He’s also right when he details several reasons why they serve a useful purpose, the most important one being: they’re simple.

The concept is easy to understand: more hitpoints is a good thing, fewer is a bad thing. There’s no difficulty in keeping track of your character’s health in a fight. Hitpoints avoid a lot of tedious complication.

Still, they are absurd to many, which brings us to the question: is there a better way to measure life and injury in RPGs? Or is the hitpoint system really the best method overall?

Most of the RPG systems on my shelf use HPs one way or another, but there are some that don’t. For example, the original Star Wars had no hitpoints and, for that matter, no endurance stat.

Damage was calculated against strength in opposed rolls. The shooter rolled damage dice, the target rolled strength dice. The two values were compared and a table consulted for the result, which could be anything from merely stunned to mortally wounded.

A more complex system was used in Shadowrun, with dice rolls for calculating successes, damage staging, and damage resistance. Here, though, characters did have an endurance stat.

Ars Magica was another that compared damage rolls against protection to determine how severe the target was injured. While there was no endurance, characters used stamina as part of their defense.

What these three have in common is the use of an abstract damage monitor that goes from “lightly wounded” to “mortally wounded”, or some variant of this. The important feature is that, however powerful the character, the monitor doesn’t change over time.

So advanced characters are as vulnerable as they were at the start. Naturally, each system has ways of improving protection (or reducing damage), but the fact remains that combat in these games could become lethal quite easily.

Is that desirable, especially in a computer RPG? Would anyone be pleased to know that, however powerful his character was, it still had as good a chance of dying in any fight as a beginner would?

Keep in mind, also, that these systems impose penalties for being wounded. So even a light injury would impair your abilities in combat.

Non-HP systems may be workable in a pen & paper game, because combats usually don’t happen too often, and the DM can always fudge things a bit. However, when we consider the number of fights in a typical RPG, the chance of needing a reload increases enormously when the damage monitor is static.

So yeah, keep the fancy stuff; in a computer RPG, I’ll take hitpoints every time.

As I mentioned on Coyote’s blog, games are artificial pretty much by definition, so I don’t have a problem with hit points or any other system that’s actually fun to play. Fun is more important than realism.

And when a character really matters, as in an RPG, realism could very easily get in the way of fun. It’s different for such games as Dwarf Fortress, where a permanently crippled character is a minor setback at worst (and an interesting part of the story at best) – or in something like X-Com: UFO Defense, where losing a skilled soldier hurts, but is expected, from time to time.

I dunno that I’d go so far as saying that non-HP based systems are best for any computer game. I have heard that Gareth is working on some alternative system for Scars of War. I’m sure that there are infinite game designs out there (mostly in unexplored RPG territory – there’s a ton of it out there) for which a more elaborate system would be perfect.

But – barring specific design reasons to the contrary – yeah, hit point systems are a lot better system than a lot of people give ’em credit for.

The problem is not so much the hit points as the way they are setup to scale, and that scaling ends up creating ridiculous situations in the setting.

You get to level 20 and you can kill everyone in the King’s army by yourself. Yet, to ensure you don’t walk up to his throne room and slaughter him, declaring yourself the new King (which would break the story), the designer gives him royal guards equal to your level. But then he asks you to kill the Evil Foozle, who you do manage to kill at level 20. But he had a roomful of level 20 characters guarding him, between them they would have made mincemeat of Foozle, why did he need you?

And then there are the cases like the cannons and the falling in lava/boiling acid, where 20th level characters can laugh it off. Or absorbing 45 direct hits from 1d8 arrows before going down. Were all 45 shots ones that simply glanced your cheek? What about when you roll a perfect 20 as a DM and the arrow crits? Somehow the enemy has critically hit…I mean glancingly hit that 20th level fighter?

That kind of thing. It’s not the numbers that are the problem, it’s the way they scale and relate to each other, resulting in situations that are silly when you think about them.

It’s trivial to think of a simple abstraction that is a bit better. (This is not what SoW uses btw, just an example.)

You could, for example, use the trick that Star Trek used. In just about every battle, the Enterprise had to have it’s shields breached before it took real damage. Which allowed combat to be dramatic and there to be missiles traded without having to explain how the Enterprise was able to stand direct hits every single time.

Split hit points into health and “combat defense”. Then have attacks wear out your “combat defense” rating before they start hitting your real health. You make it so that “combat defense” is the value that increases most as you go up levels, you don’t get a lot more hit points. Then you simply make it that certain types of damage bypass combat defense and go straight to health. Falling damage. Cannonballs. Poison. Being dipped in lava. Traps. While you haven’t eliminated the “one man can take on entire army” problem there, you have eliminated one class of ridiculous nonsense. High level fighters can’t use their hit point cushion to “brute force” their way through traps, for example.

You can also have “combat defense” quickly regenerate outside combat, allowing you to have the benefit of restoring the effectiveness of characters between fights without implying that people can bounce back from mortal injury in seconds. Or introducing magic spells into the world that do the same, which then in turn adds in a range of questions about why pain and injury exist in your setting at all.

It’s a simple concept that works out to be fairly similar to hit points in most situations but allows you to keep certain things lethal regardless of how high a level the player achieves.

Would the idea of splitting our HP and “defense” be too complex for players? No, evidence suggests not. Many, many action games I have played (mainly sci-fi) have had an extra status bar under health representing “energy shields”. If action gamers can handle it, so can RPGers. :)

It’s not necessary to add tons of complexity to make improvements. I do not think the question is limited to “do you want simple hit points or complex wound lookup-tables and calculations which would take a human hours to perform?”. I think the question is whether we can come up with an improved abstraction without losing too much of the positive aspects of straight hit points.

Hmmm. Interesting method, Gareth. That could have possibilities, with proper implementation. Where would armor protection come into this? Also, there’d have to be an explanation as to why this “combat defense” acts like “extra hitpoints”. You know, those spells that give hps beyond the normal amount.

Would there have to be a particularly complex explanation? It’s abstract, but RPGers have been fine with abstract for a while. We’re used to building strategies around watching little bars changing.

I think most people understand that real combat isn’t about 2 people sitting there stabbing each other in the chest until one person falls over dead. Put in a little explanation about how combat defense represents a combination of how effectively you are able to dodge, parry and block (and hence absorb/negate damage from hits), based on tiredness and pain levels, and I think most people would accept it fairly easily. So long as the system itself isn’t too complex and results in fun.

Why not use it in SoW? Well, SoW uses a cousin of that idea, one that is a bit more complex. In response to your post, I wanted to discuss how I think it is easy to make some simple changes without getting too complex. But SoW’s system IS more complex, mainly because I like complexity and I’m making a game for me, first and foremost. :) I chose to rather post up a simpler concept as illustration of how I think it’s totally possible.

You can read some of the concepts around SoW combat in the thread on the ITS forums. It’s not complete yet (I’ve been busy lately), but if you follow along I will be going into the concepts in depth.

Not every RPG system has hit points, but it is a benchmark for many RPGs. Perhaps a small resurrection of the SSI system is in order since no matter how powerful you were, there was a chance against certain monsters that you’d get killed. I believe the ‘roll’ was damage type versus defense that determined this, but it’s been far too long since groups of medium to high level monsters presented a real threat to players.

Originally Frayed Knights had much less of that scaling. Some remnants of the old system are still there – like the “boost” of base hit points and stat bonuses above your level factors. So a level 4 character isn’t 4x more capable than a level 1 character.

The idea – one that I’ve been playing with for a while – was to make characters more vulnerable to larger groups of enemies. So no matter how buff you are, you will get overpowered by a large enough force of bad guys.

Like I’ve said, I’ve fallen away from that idea somewhat. For this kind of RPG, it just didn’t make much sense. I have to serve the needs of the game. There’s still enough of that in there – higher level characters remain far from immune from attacks by lower-level enemies, so a large enough force WILL overpower them – but I’ve really needed to err on the side of familiarity.

The scaling thing really does help the player see the effects of their progression, though. If the numbers don’t get larger in front, the fact that the mechanics are favoring the player in the back is easy to miss.

The PC version of the Wolverine: Origins game implemented a health system very much like the one Gareth suggests, and it works very well.

The comic book character Wolverine is known for his incredible ability to heal himself.

In the game, his health bar is split into two sections: ‘vitals’ and a standard life bar.

The standard life bar regenerates fairly quickly when out of combat.

If the life bar is completely depleted, Wolverine’s vitals are exposed – the idea is that he is so wounded that his flesh and muscle have been torn away from his vital organs, literally exposing them to enemy attack.

(I’m happy to say that this is actually reflected by the in-game model. Beautiful work on the damage/healing visuals.)

Damage to vitals regenerates very, very slowly. If vital health goes down to zero, Wolverine is dead. It is possible to have very low Vitals while having a full health bar.

This damage system works very well. It’s fairly sensible in context, feels fair, and is not overly punitive. What’s more, if used in other games it would allow for neat tricks, such as varying combat capability according to vital health, not fast-regenerating health, or requiring a hospital to heal vitals, but being able to treat fast-regenerating health with first aid in the field.